A Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman said police had found at the scene " 'East Turkestan' terror forces flags and other evidence," without providing further details. The evidence supports the official claim made Sunday that the attack was a terror tactic aimed at gaining independence for a large slice of northwest China.

East Turkestan is a politically charged, historical name for all or part of Xinjiang, and used by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Uighur separatist group long blamed by Beijing for violence in Xinjiang.

Earlier reports from Xinhua and other state-run media indicated more than 10 assailants attacked people at the main Kunming railway station in southwest China. At least 143 people were wounded as the attackers, some of them masked and dressed in black, used long knives to slash and stab victims.

Xinhua, citing the Ministry of Public Security, said Monday that six men and two women carried out the attack led by Abdurehim Kurban. Although Xinhua did not identify his gender or ethnicity, Abdurehim Kurban's name sounds like a man belonging to the Uighur ethnic group, a Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim people based in Xinjiang, where anger against Chinese Communist rule has simmered for decades.

Police shot and killed four of the attackers and captured one wounded female Saturday night. They cracked the case on Monday afternoon, reported Xinhua, without giving information on how or when the three other suspects were seized.

In other cases of Xinjiang-related violence, state media has likewise not publicly identified the suspects' ethnicity. One possible reason may be to avoid further inflaming tensions between the Uighur and China's majority Han population. In 2009, race riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, killed almost 200 people, mostly Han.